I PLAYED AGAIN!

I remember watching a video, a few months back, put out by Jerry Williams, 3 Star Parelli Professional. In it he talks about taking responsibility for how your horses behave, taking responsibility for how you as the human partner and leader behave. Well, something clicked for me last night. I woke up with that idea in my head this morning. If being hurt was not their fault but mine, then I better get my act together and REALLY take responsibility for what happened.

I've reread Dr. Stephanie Burn's book MOVE CLOSER, STAY LONGER and then I did it again because I didn't pay attention. I didn't absorb what I read. In it she talks about her journey while learning how to play/work and live with horses and the program she put together to deal with fear. She talks about how your brain, sly devil that it is, will take over and try to save you from yourself! Uh huh. Mine does that all the time. It's an expert at helping to find ways to procrastinate, to do other things that are easy for me to do ... safe stuff like cleaning the house, cleaning the barn, pulling weeds ... instead of doing the things that help me to grow and change, to get outside the comfort zone where it's scary. 


Well, today I decided to take responsibility for breaking my own pattern of going right brain. I did everything backward. Instead of cleaning the house, taking my shower after working out, neatening and tidying up all the messy places, I made sure my arm brace was off and then I surfed the net, watched silly YouTube videos, ate some chocolate, went out for a walk WITHOUT MY ARM BRACE and then I went into the paddock with the horses and we played together.

Did you catch that? WE PLAYED TOGETHER! I did it, I did it, I really, really did it ... YES! I REALLY DID IT! I'm sitting here with a pack of ice on my achy arm and typing left handed, but I did it. I even moved the carrot stick from my left hand to my right and back again. And, oh, the sighing and licking and chewing on their part...the laughing and crying and "Ow, ow, ow!" ing on my part. The sun is out and I played for just five minutes with Lucky and Apache ... and I feel like a million bucks!

I've asked for help to, from friends of mine, to help me through this process of banging the dents out of my confidence. I'm learning how to unbend and ASK. I'm pretty good at humble pie now. In fact, it tastes pretty good!


Other things I've done today :
1. Top of the list is playing with Lucky and Apache for five minutes
2. Brushed Miniver with my right hand
3. Made the bed, lifting the heavy top cover, with both hands
4. Filled the water bowls and buckets, mostly using my left hand but supporting it with my right (water is heavy and moves around)
5. I've spent the whole day with my arm brace off! (You'd be surprised at how hard that is to do when you've become used to the protection and support it provides.)
6. I trimmed some of Joe's hair off with a scissors, using my right hand to do it.


Every day it just gets better and better! WOOHOO! I'm back in the saddle again...metaphorically speaking.


I am ever yours, Nancy, doing a happy feet dance, ice bag and all!

SOMETIMES THINGS JUST HAPPEN...

Sometimes things just happen. 


On January 3rd I broke my arm. Maybe I should be more specific. I smashed it, breaking both bones, tearing ligaments, damaging nerves... the full Monty. 


Wish I could say it's over now. I will heal but it's going to take a bit more time than I thought. I have several more weeks of physical therapy to get through and then there's the gigantic dent in my confidence to deal with. But at least I can sit here and type. There's a plus!


I've been "writing the story" in my head for weeks, wanting to get it all down. But the truth is I'm kind of tired of it now. It just is. 

It was my fault. I didn't focus, didn't think about what happens before what happens happens. I was too  lost in my game,stuck on a silly goal and not thinking about the 'here and now'. I didn't think like a horse. They have one goal, to survive. They were fulfilling their goal, from their point of view. If I'd been more in the moment and paying attention to
 what was going on right then, instead of thinking about what I wanted to do, none of this would have occurred. Lesson learned the hard way!

So, the only thing to do now is to go straight forward from here. I'll have to do some restart but that will probably be good for me anyway. I need to practice being 'here and now' LOTS more. I thought I was doing that but my gnarly arm tells me different.


Truth be told, I seriously thought about quitting, throwing the towel in, walking away, giving up. I knew I wasn't going to do that the day after my surgery. I'd been told not to go down to the barn. Resting and healing was going to be my new job for the next few months. But John came in and told me that Lucky and Apache were lethargic, hanging up around the gate (where the accident happened) and off their feed. So I broke my first set of rules, didn't follow instructions and walked down to see them.

I admit I was pretty whacked out from the pain meds. I really wasn't thinking clearly. But I couldn't let them stand out there, depressed, either. John said they'd been like that since the accident but he was afraid to tell me (because he knew I'd go out there, of course). And that's when I made the decision I wasn't going to quit. I would just have to look at it as a painful lesson. 


I'm going to keep a list of all the little steps forward that I make. I'll need them to convince myself it's all OK. I can still reach for goals. I just need to be a bit more Zen about it and less monkey brained obsessed! 

Things I've done today :
1. Typed this entry, sometimes using both hands.
2. Pulled on my cowboy boots and took them off by myself.
3. Put my hair up by myself (can't say it looks great, but still I did it!)
4. Made it through the day without needing to sleep
5. Folded all the laundry using both hands
6. And, the really BIG accomplishment, I went in to the paddock by myself and hung out with Lucky and Apache without being nervous.

Now all I have to do is put on my 'Little Engine That Could' cap and get my mojo back.


I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...


"Chug, chug, chug.", she said as she went up the hill. 


I am, ever yours, Nancy, slightly dented but back in the game, smiling!

BACK IN THE GAME

WOOHOO! I'm back. November was NANOWRIMO... National Novel Writing Month. I wrote 50,000 words (actually a bit more) in one month. It was a very funny disaster. This time (I did this three years ago too) I did have a better idea of what I wanted to accomplish, so it was a great way to push myself into launching a project that I would have continued to put off. And I always work better with a goal and some time constraint.

Weather wise we've been having exactly the kind of weather needed to continue working with Lucky and Apache with some regularity. We're all having fun with it too. Somehow, when I put my focus (translates as linear thinking) on the NANOWRIMO, it made the work/play time more fun. Lucky, especially, loves that. He can be hypersensitive to pressure. When it's "play", we both relax and accomplish more in the long run.

Hmmmmmmmm...how interesting! (look at how fit he's getting, in the picture above.)

 It rained all day and all night this past Saturday so things are, at last, nice and wet again. Then it froze this morning and this was the way it looked. Pretty, isn't it? I love it when there's fog and frost at the same time. It takes the detail out of the world and leaves beautiful, graphic images. It's also Apache's kind of weather. Every time he moved, it was at a trot. It's always a celebration for Apache. Never a dull moment for him!

And Lucky...oh my. I did it. I found his motivation, a way to make it feel like everything we're doing is his idea. What a difference it's making in our communication. I think it was 3/4's Parelli and 1/4 me. My timing and feel is much better now. I've been working with another horse with an entirely different horsenality than my two (Right Brain Extrovert). She's an 8 year old Arab who's pretty much just been standing around in a field most of her life. And everything is HUGE when she's taken out of her comfort zone (namely, her pasture and away from her mates). I've been taking it in teeny, tiny steps. It probably looks like paint drying to other people, but it's worked very nicely with her. She comes to me now when I get there and looks forward to the grass on the other side of the fence, there for her enjoyment and edification! Work/play with her has taken me further outside my comfort zone, making me learn more about different types of horses and how to read their body language. My tactics with any horse have changed as a result of it. Thanks Mercedes!

Back to Lucky...today I thought he was not going to be interested in playing. He was being very nonchalant, not very engaged or interested in me. Or so I thought! He was like that yesterday too, so I sat down on the mounting block and left him alone. I spent most of my time waiting for him to come to me on his own. When he did, we played for a very short time and then I released him and let him go. Well, guess that paid off.

I finished all the chores this morning, and was getting ready to go in when he came to me, put his nose on my pocket (where I keep carrot pieces) and then looked right at me. "Aren't we going to play today?" The idea of playing for tomorrow really paid off this time. When we played/worked this morning, it was all his idea. No better way to motivate a horse than that!

It was kind of slick out there for the first time in quite a while so I played more "small games" than the usual big field games we play. Both of us were sliding around out there.

I've been working on honing my ability to give him the idea of what game we're playing and how, using the lightest cues. The more subtle I get, the more excited he is. " Ma, you talk fluent horse now!"

Lucky is a Left Brain Introvert on the cusp Right Brain Introvert, so he slips from being pushy and alpha to being shy and introverted in his behaviors. No wonder it's been such a rocky journey for us! My skills are only just starting to catch up with him. "Horses teach humans and humans teach horses." Probably the biggest professor I've ever had!

When I left Lucky, he was standing at the gate calling to me, pushing the gate and rattling the chain. I love the way all of this is working out. Maybe he's the one who's set it up for me to do a better job! I can't wait for tomorrow.

I am, ever yours, Nancy, back in the game again

GRAVEL ROADS ...

I love our gravel road. It winds back and forth, up and down. It's not quite like any of the other areas  here in Northeast Kansas. We're a good two miles off the beaten path in any direction. Most of the traffic we see is other neighbors up and down the road a piece (and around here that can mean a neighbor across the road to ten or fifteen miles away) or a tractor or combine on it's way to any given field for the day.

We moved out here because it is remote, away from all of the traffic, noise and people ... the lawn mowers and leaf blowers. Nothing wrong with living in town if you're happy doing it, but neither John or I was. When the opportunity and reason to move came, we jumped on it and never looked back. The flat tires, washed out roads, loss of power in a storm and extra effort that it takes to do shopping or to get to work is more than worth effort. In fact, it's made both of us more efficient. Going to town is never a willy nilly thing anymore. We always, one or the other of us, have several errands to run. We get them done and then go home with a real sense of relief.

It's taken ten years for the neighboring farmers to accept us "in to the club". When we first moved out here our truck was too new and we were "green" when it came to understanding how to keep a pasture cleared, fence lines in good condition, or how to heat with wood. Course they all think I'm a bit balmy because I name all of the cows. By the end of the summer they're all coming up to me to have their heads scratched. "Miss Nancy, you never name the cows. You know where they're all going so don't get personal." Sorry, they're in our pasture so, while they're here, they're part of my life style. They get apples and the ticks picked off just like the horses. Cows can be pretty cool and their tongues are huge, wet and sloppy.

In town we lived in a much bigger house in one of those suburban places where everyone sprayed their yards and planted bushes. Flowers were planted in careful patterns and no one ever picked them...except in our yard. We took down the fences, made the back yard in to a Wild Life Federation Habitat with paths going through and everyone was welcome to pick any wildflowers they wanted to. In May, right around Mother's Day, kids in the neighborhood would stop by (most of them took the short cut on our paths, through the back yard, on their way home from school) to pick flowers to take to their Mom's. I learned to send notes with the children so the Mom's would know the flowers were given to the kids and not taken without permission.

 Needless to say, the local neighborhood association and I clashed a bit so I compromised. The front yard was where the "formal" gardens were (although anyone could pick those flowers as far as I was concerned and our little patch of lawn had dandylions and wild flowers in it too.). I designed them rather than throwing bags of wild flower seeds out and waiting to see what came up.

My house was bigger and more carefully designed. I was, after all, an interior designer. Long story short, now I'm not!

Now we live in a house that was converted from a barn (we keep it cool most of the Summer using the old barn fan that was put there for the milk cows), it's smaller and nothing about it is designed. The carpets are ancient, the linoleum is fading, the kitchen cabinets are poorly organized and the handles are cheap plastic.  The down stairs is where we write, paint and store the seeds and produce from our gardens. The upstairs is a great, wide open area with no dining room and a huge fireplace that helps to keep the upstairs warm in the Winter.

And every year I find new places to plant more gardens. Some of them are herb gardens, some flower gardens. We have areas that are all native wild flowers that bring in more birds, butterflies and wild life every year. And we have areas that are raised beds for vegetables, a small orchard we've started with each tree commemorating one of our four legged family members that have moved on to whatever comes next.

All I ever wear anymore are blue jeans and overalls, hats to keep the sun off my face and neck, old hankies in my pockets and my beloved beat up cowboy boots. Both of us are hard and skinny from all of the physical work required to keep a place like this going. I never "do" my hair anymore and the make up in the drawer in the bathroom is getting dried up from never being used.

Am I in my element? Oh yeah...absolutely. My horses are in the back yard, my truck is old and faded now and so am I. It's not quite as much fun as having little boys, but it's a pretty doggone close second. I spend my days going sun up to sun down, working, with no other sounds than the wind, the birds and the horses.

A friend wrote to me today and asked me how it's going in "Nancy's World" and I realized I hadn't checked in here lately. I've been doing NANOWRIMO this month. I know there's a way to turn that in to a link to the website, but I'm not quite that tech savvy yet.

I'm writing a novel (50,000 words) in one month. I did it three years ago. It was mostly a disaster, with me coughing up words in no coherent way. I just wanted to get my number. What a silly goal! But it got me going in a new direction, this BLOG being part of my focus. So this year I'm more prepared and have a story line, an idea that I worked out ahead of time. I even passed up the opportunity to cheat by writing ahead of time (which means that I have to make up words after taking the time to write here). I'm interested in e publishing as an additional source of income while I reach for my goal as a certified Parelli Professional...the true final goal.

I've had my own small study buddy group with several very nice people involved along with their horses. What a nice way to stretch myself while I learn how to interact with different horsenalities and personalities.

Is my life ideal? Heck no! I'm probably working harder than I ever have except for the first intense years of being a young Mom. This is like being back in a self imposed graduate school with all of the attendant worries, goals and expenses. Good thing I like to learn so much!

I probably won't write here again until the end of the month. I should have all kinds of funny things to tell you about my latest adventures in writing and whether I made it to my goal of 50,000 words. And I'll have stories to tell you about playing with horses and helping other people to learn how to play with their horses too. That just gets better and better.

In the meantime, if you're out in our neck of the woods...literally!...I hope you'll stop by for Thanksgiving dinner or just to say "Howdy!"

I am, ever yours, Nancy, slightly brain burned and dusty from the gravel dust blowing in the windows, smiling!

PARELLI CORE VALUES

 I was scrolling down through my Facebook page and found a posting by Parelli Natural Horsemanship. It's a list of their core values as a business, a school and as a community of people focused on making the world a better place for horses and humans.

I love it! It's evolving (as in "Make your good better and your better best.") so as it changes and I find out about it, I'll post the newest versions too.

This is the first and only organization I've ever chosen to be a part of for this long a period. The above list is one of the reasons I stay with it. Thank You, Parelli, for making it so easy for this loan wolf to become a member.

I am, ever yours, Nancy, smiling at the way things go...

A LOCUST AND A SNAKE

Sometimes an event, maybe even a small, insignificant event, can change your course in ways you don't expect.

This morning, while coming back up from the compost area, a locust flew from my right (North) and stopped in  the air in front of me, hovering. It made a high pitched "brrrr...rrrrr...rrrr" sound. I stopped to watch it and, out of curiosity, counted. How long was it going to hang in the air in front of me? I counted past thirty. It gave me plenty of time to wonder at how handsome and efficient an insect it was. I had no idea that locusts did that, hovering in the air for long periods of time.

I know that they can travel in huge masses, flying on the wind and settling on crops and landscapes, eating everything in their path. But today is very still, no more than a light breeze, and it was only one locust that looked much like the bottom one in the picture above.

It's wings were dark with a white stripe up towards the connection to the body. It must have been the wings moving against each other that made the high pitched whirring noise. I've had wood bees scan me (I think they're usually called Carpenter Bees for the hole they drill into the surface of anything made of wood). I've never felt a locust stop to sing and look at me. 

Just as the locust began to fly on to my left (south), I looked down and there, on the ground in front of me less than three feet away, was a large, mature Copperhead. It was precisely where I would have stepped. It moved on towards the right (north) at exactly the same time the locust moved on to the left. If I had not stopped to look at the hovering locust...if I hadn't stopped to study it and wonder at it, I would have stepped on or right next to the Copperhead and most likely have been bitten in the leg. 

The locust stopped again, hovering in front of me and about a foot from my left shoulder, still whirring, until the Copperhead had disappeared into the woods about fifteen feet to my right (north). It flew on, never hitting the ground, off into the pasture towards the woods several acres away. And I stood there, listening to a locust sing in mid air and watching more than three feet of Copperhead slither past me.

It was a single locust, out of season, that saved me from serious injury.

We live in snake country out here. I'm usually very careful about where I walk or what I lean over and pick up. I carry a walking stick with me to flip rocks and logs over or to poke underneath them before I step over or sit on anything. But this time it was a locust who was my warning system.

Being with my horses is a meditative experience for me. It meshes perfectly with my life as an artist. During the day I'm usually here by myself, working and playing with my horses, working in the barn or on fences, planting my gardens, painting or sketching, and sometimes writing about my life, here, on my BLOG. Most of what I do is quiet, without words, and experienced  from the right, more intuitive side, of my brain. 

The older I get, the further into living in quiet I go, the easier it is to still the constant voice that jabbers away in my brain. I've become more connected to my horses, dogs and cats, the cattle that live here in Summer and the wild life. There are no radios, no TV, and most of the time the only music I listen to comes from the sounds of the wind and trees around me, the birds and frogs that sing through three seasons of the year. 

I've been reading a book that a friend gave to me; ZEN MIND, ZEN HORSE written by Allan Hamilton, MD. He's (you're going to love this!) a renowned Harvard trained Neuro Surgeon and a Natural Horsemanship Clinician. Both John and I have read it and now I'm reading it again. It's an excellent book that very closely parallels the techniques and philosophies that I've been learning with the Parelli System. 

In the book, Dr. Hamilton discusses and compares the brain of a human and the brain of a horse and how they function...the differences and similarities. Not surprisingly, he also talks about the two sides of his own personality and the ways that his mind works in his polar opposite roles as a Surgeon working with highly precise instruments, putting his emotions to the side to perform his operations and the Horseman, working in an environment where your intuitive side has to reign, making snap decisions for you. 

This morning I was in a place I call the "Zone". I open myself to the rhythms of the world around me. I let time go. There are no watches or time schedules in the "Zone". And, for the most part, there is no voice in my head. I'm in the moment, feeling, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing and seeing. It's really a very sensuous place to be. I always feel more connected and fully awake when I'm in the "Zone". When you spend as much time with super prey that weigh, on average, around a thousand pounds each, as I do,  it's not a bad place to be. Things with horses can change in a nano second.

I'd been aware that something was making them nervous, keeping them up closer to the barn this morning. And Miniver, my dog, had come over and kept putting herself in my path too. She weighs around 100 pounds, so she's hard to ignore when she does that. Usually I pay more attention to her when she behaves so protective, but I was visualizing my last session with Lucky and Apache, playing at Liberty together out in the pasture. I was not as focused on my surroundings as I should have been. So I wasn't as in the "Zone" as I thought I was either. 

All of the animals around me were. 

But I did reconnect with the "Zone" when I listened to the locust. 

My question for myself is "Why didn't I do a better job of listening to the horses and Miniver?" and the sixty four thousand dollar question is "Where did the locust come from and why did it hover in front of me at that precise moment?" (I'm not questioning the snake. It was in it's habitat, doing what it always does.)

I'm going to be licking and chewing on this one for quite a while. Oh, and if you want a really good read (and I can suggest it even if you aren't a horse person!), I would definitely put a copy of Dr. Hamilton's book, ZEN MIND, ZEN HORSE on your holiday list this year. 

I am, ever yours, Nancy, smiling at you from the "Zone"

OUT IN THE MISTY MIDDLES....

Ever find yourself drifting off the subject in the middle of a conversation? Or maybe just distracting yourself from finishing what you started? I remember, a few years back, listening to a lecture on how to keep yourself motivated by Dr. Stephanie Burns. She told her audience that it all depended on what kind of person you are...a person who likes beginnings, a student who likes to be out there in the middle or a super goal oriented person who seeks the goal at the expense of the path you need to take to get there.


Myself? I love beginnings. I always liked the first day of school. I loved the smell of my new box of crayons, all of the blank notebooks with lots of space for possibilities, my new clothes...all of it. And I still do. It's always exciting, finding a new subject to learn about and to do the research on. There's all the new people to talk to about it and websites to find and read. Even though I'm goal oriented, it was always the beginning I liked best. 

The hard part for me is the middles...the vasty, boggy, get lost in the fog (also known as distracted) and wade in it up to my knees middles. Middles always seem so long, so unavoidable, so dull. I always "did my middles", especially because I wanted to reach the goal so I could start another wonderful, bright shiny new beginning. I like the adrenalin rush, the small bit of stress that puts me outside that comfort zone we all love to talk about, so I can learn something brand new.


When I can get to the other end of my day and say " Look at that! I learned something new today.", then I feel like it was in the "best day" category. "That was my best day ever!" I still get to say that ever so often and I still love the feeling it gives me. It's all I can do to keep from picking up the phone and calling a friend to tell them goofy things like " Hey, I learned how to make a poultice with a paper baby diaper soaked in apple cider vinegar and Epsom salts, some vet wrap and duck tape." Uh huh...you can imagine how exciting that is for most people, can't you? Or, how about " I know what Thrush smells and looks like. I learned that today when my donkey's hooves were kind of oozy and smelly." 


It's new and I love to figure out the puzzle, how it works, what to do with all of the information I didn't have before. But then come the middles...the long, dusty, musty middles where the Thrush comes back and I still have to deal with it again. Course, I do it because the end goal of clean, healthy hooves is out there beckoning so (you knew this was coming!) I can start again.

This year has been one with endings I didn't want to get to and beginnings that still leave me in awe of how much there is to learn! I have another horse to play and work with. She isn't mine. She belongs to a friend and lives up the road a bit, but still close enough for me to get over to play with her a couple of times a week. Her name is Mercedes. She's helping me to fill that place in me that loves grey mares. I can't have one of my own right now so I get to do something that's second best...begin again with a friend's horse. That a double beginning! It's the first time I've seriously tried to work with someone else's horse when they weren't involved. 

And there's Miniver. You might say she's one of my huge beginnings (pun definitely intended. She's still growing too, so she's going to get bigger!).

And there's Abby, my newest and youngest study buddy. She isn't able to make it out every week, but ever so often she comes to see us with her Grandma. She's a true natural with all of the animals. She loves everything about them...the smells, the bond, the interactions and even the hard work. She loves to muck out the stalls and sweep the barn! Now that's what I call a true horse-woman in the making.

There's new relationships to foster. (That's me, Nancy Doolittle)

And John who's just beginning his journey with Apache! 

And....ta da!...my new study buddy group. We meet once a week and it's fascinating every single time. It's sort of like a wedding...something always happens! I'm a bit further ahead than they are so I've been having a lot of fun showing them the ropes (another pun intended!).


It's been a year for more beginnings than I'd realized before I started this story today. No wonder the year is flying by so fast! Whew...lots of "outside the comfort zone" time for me. 


But if you go back to the beginning (there's that word again!) of this BLOG entry, you'll find that I've also distracted myself too by wondering a bit from what I intended to talk about. 


I'm in the misty, vast, sometimes overwhelming in it's size middles with Lucky. And with Apache too since he and I still play together when John can't. I'm here, smack dab in the middle, trying to keep my head on straight and my focus on the goal. Although I can't let myself do that with too much intention since horses have only one goal...survival. If I get too direct line Lucky knows that and he responds by being evasive.    sigh...


See what I mean? It's getting more and more complicated and Zen and anything Zen is going to twist your mind around. 

So I've decided to treat everyday like the beginning that it is. I go to bed saying "Whew...did a lot today. Got all kinds of things done. Good for me!" And I wake up the next day saying " Hot dog! I get to start again. Doesn't get any better than that!" and off I go, through the gate , wading through the middle and ending again, sometimes in the wee hours of the morning because it's so hard to get my head to turn off. I'm having that much fun!


I'm not sure that's exactly what Dr. Burns was suggesting to us when she talked about keeping yourself motivated but it's working for me, at least for now. 


I'm out the door to set the playground up in a new design so we can approach our games from another point of view. This is my middles time of the day and you, dear reader, are my distraction. And it doesn't get any better than that!

My fan club awaits! 


I am, ever yours, Nancy, laughing